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April 29, 2026
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SEJ News: #SEJ2026 Live — Coverage of Conference Tours
A team of early-career freelance journalists joined SEJournal’s editors to report on the April 16 day-long tours at the annual Society of Environmental Journalists’ conference, which took place April 15-18, 2026, in Chicago, Illinois.
Explore the reports below.
- Chicago environmental justice tour — By Tina Deines
- Indiana Dunes tour — By Julie Zenderoudi
- Nachusa Grasslands tour — By Madeline Shaw
- Chicago wastewater tour — By Emma Schneck
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The #SEJ2026 Live initiative comprised eight early-career freelance journalists — Emma Schneck, Julie Zenderoudi, Madeline Shaw, Marlowe Starling, Meg Duff, Nathaniel Eisen, Nhung Nguyen and Tina Deines — working with SEJournal editor Adam Glenn.
Additional editing provided by Frances Backhouse, associate editor, with copy editing by Cindy MacDonald and production by MJ Davis.
Many thanks to the SEJ’s Aparna Mukherjee, executive director, for her encouragement and financial backing of this initiative, and to Jingyao Yu, director of operations and engagement, for her logistical support.
All stories and images are available open-source for other outlets and organizations to share and republish, with credit and links. Material for this coverage was drawn from tours organized by the Society of Environmental Journalists at its annual conference in Chicago, Illinois, in April 2026, whose sponsors are listed here.
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| A remnant of U.S. Steel's South Works mill, which has been converted into a rock climbing wall at Chicago’s Steelworkers Park. Photo: Tina Deines. |
Toxic Doughnuts, Sulfur Piles and Slag
#SEJ2026 attendees get crash course on Chicago environmental justice tour
By Tina Deines
Lake Michigan’s seemingly endless expanse of emerald blue water serves as a backdrop for Steelworkers Park on Chicago’s South Side. Gulls and geese call out, as locals fish on rocks below.
But all is not as it seems. Just to the west are the ruins of U.S. Steel's South Works mill, which closed in 1992. The concrete slabs that remain are now adorned with graffiti and a small rock-climbing wall.
Meanwhile, the rumble of heavy equipment behind this open space — the future site of the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park — blends in with waterfowl’s vocalizations.
The park was one of several stops during the #SEJ2026 conference’s Chicago environmental justice tour. The event was led by Brett Chase, a Chicago Sun-Times reporter and assistant editor, and Gina Ramirez, director of Midwest Environmental Health for the Natural Resources Defense Council and an active member of the Southeast Environmental Task Force, a Chicago nonprofit.
Cheryl Johnson, executive director of the grassroots group People for Community Recovery and daughter of Hazel Johnson — known as the “mother of environmental justice” — also spoke.
‘Dumping grounds for industry’
Chase began the tour with a brief history of Chicago’s environmental justice concerns, based on his years of work as an environmental reporter for the Sun-Times.
“The West Side and South Side have long been the dumping grounds for the industry,” he said. “This whole area wasn’t built for residents; it was built for industry.”
The group began its visit at Altgeld Gardens housing complex in the far Southeast Side, where the predominantly Black community has faced ongoing environmental hazards over the last half century. This is where Hazel Johnson started her environmental justice work and where her daughter continues those efforts today.
Altgeld Gardens is surrounded by industrial sites, landfills — Hazel Johnson’s work documented at least 50 of them in the area — and incinerators, which have caused elevated levels of pollutants such as heavy metals and pesticides.
“We label our community as the toxic doughnut,” Cheryl Johnson said, referring to a phrase of her mother’s.
Cheryl Johnson also talked about plans to revitalize a deteriorating building that once served as a school and community hub, and convert it into the Hazel M. Johnson Institute for Sustainability and Environmental Justice.
According to Cheryl Johnson, it would be the first institute focused on environmental justice based in a predominantly low-income and minority public housing project. Funds of $20 million would need to be raised for the initiative.
‘The taste of sparklers’
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| Tour leader Brett Chase, left, with Luis Cabrales, program and event facilitator for Chicago Parks Department, at Big Marsh visitor center. Photo: Tina Deines. |
The tour continued through the 10th Ward Industrial Corridor, Chicago’s most polluted industrial area and home to three active Superfund sites, as well as abandoned steelmaking brownfields.
The bus also passed by rolling hills — of garbage. “Anytime you see a hill in Chicago, that was a landfill at some point,” Chase had explained earlier in the tour.
While in Chicago’s Hegewisch neighborhood, Ramirez, who grew up in the Southeast Side, spoke about the issues facing this Latino-majority area, including a neon-yellow sulfur pile that releases foul odors.
“Once you get close, it kind of tastes like sparklers,” she said. “You can taste it.”
The group also stopped at Big Marsh, a 299-acre park in the South Deering community. The city of Chicago-managed space, now home to wildlife habitat and 140 acres of bike park, sits on a historic wetland that once served as an industrial dumping ground for slag from steel mills in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Hazel Johnson led a movement in the 1980s to fight against further industrial degradation and landfill expansion there, and the Chicago Park District purchased the land in 2011. After restoration activities, the space opened to the public in 2016.
At the park’s Ford Calumet Environmental Center, Luis Cabrales, the CPD’s program and event facilitator, characterized the space during a short presentation as a “postindustrial park,” and said it welcomes field trips, bird watchers, researchers and cyclists.
Cabrales also lamented the ongoing environmental hazards that surround the property. For instance, compost heaps are piled atop garbage-filled mounds at a landfill adjacent to the park. On warm, windy days, this compost — food waste from all over Chicago — heats up, sending smoke into the park and nearby neighborhood.
One of the tour attendees noted the paradox of one environmental solution leading to another environmental problem.
Inside the park center, tour attendees also got the chance to check out interpretive panels about local wildlife, environmental justice and recreation opportunities.
‘A cumulative burden’
Throughout the tour, Ramirez pointed out how close polluting industries often are to the community. For instance, a manganese facility sits next to a Little League field. In addition to contributing to local air quality issues, it has leached lead, arsenic and manganese — all toxic heavy metals — into the soil at the nearby baseball field.
Meanwhile, readings at George Washington High School, which serves students in Hegewisch and South Deering, have shown some of the worst air quality in the state, she said.
Ramirez also talked about the compounding impacts of other issues, such as lead pipes. Chicago has the most lead water service lines in the country, and the South Side is disproportionately affected.
“That adds to the cumulative burden,” she said, adding that the area is also a food desert and transportation desert.
Throughout the day, Ramirez pointed out greenwashing tactics used by polluting industries in the area, as well as the irony of natural spaces — marshes, Lake Michigan shorelines and parks — and environmental degradation coexisting in South Side communities.
“You have Little League fields, Superfund sites, and then you have a state park,” she said. “Every green space is dominated by industry.”
Tina Deines is an Albuquerque-based writer specializing in nature, the environment, wildlife and conservation. Her work has appeared in National Geographic News, Sierra, The Guardian, Pacific Standard, High Country News and Mongabay. Deines is also the author of the children’s book, “Daisy Sniffs Out Nature.” She previously worked as editor-in-chief and contributing writer for New Mexico Wild and the New Mexico Wild Guide.
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| Surrounded by industry, the Indiana Dunes National Park faces unique ecological challenges. Photo: Julie Zenderoudi. |
Industry, Budget Cuts Converge on Indiana Dunes’ Fragile Ecosystem
National park confronts mounting environmental threats as local communities work to sustain ecosystems
By Julie Zenderoudi
Bring your binoculars to Indiana Dunes National Park, and you might spot a great blue heron, an American woodcock — and a steel mill.
Located in northwestern Indiana, less than an hour from Chicago, the park is made up of converging ecosystems, from beaches and prairies to wetlands and savannas. What sets it apart from other national parks, however, is the industry that surrounds it.
Coal-fired power plants and industrial steel mills are embedded within the landscape, posing threats to the park’s delicate ecosystem.
“We have this juxtaposition of two things that really shouldn’t be together, but they are,” says Paul Labovitz, the park’s former superintendent, who retired in 2023.
A collision of ecosystems, the Indiana Dunes has unique challenges that the conservationists are working to address.
“Most people, when they think of national parks, don't often think about the infrastructure and the industry that is surrounding these areas. They think of these wild, untouched places,” says Trevor Edmonson, Northern Indiana stewardship lead at the nonprofit Nature Conservancy.
Vulnerability to invasive species
Because the dunes are an edge habitat — when one ecosystem meets another — invasive species are another threat to these native areas.
A 2024 case study by the National Parks Conservation Association found that air pollution stemming from coal-fired power plants and steel mills left the park particularly vulnerable to invasive species. Excess pollutants in an ecosystem can lead to overgrowth of harmful organisms; for instance, causing invasive plants to spread and risk reducing the natural biodiversity.
In another example, the emerald ash borer, a nonnative beetle that can tolerate polluted environments better than native species, has rapidly spread throughout the park. As a result, the native ash tree population has suffered.
Prescribed fires are one way conservationists are addressing the invasive species issue. “Almost all of our burns here are controlled,” says Edmonson. “It’s a vital part of this ecosystem recovery,” he explains. They happen frequently, with eight prescribed fires scheduled this spring.
According to the National Park Service, prescribed fire at Indiana Dunes is an essential element in the park’s long-term natural resources restoration goals, helping to remove invasive species, open tree canopies and increase wildlife habitat.
Learning from the original stewards
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| The Indigenous Cultural Trail at the Indiana Dunes National Park features limestone snapping turtle sculptures with Indigenous calendars on their shells. Photo: Julie Zenderoudi. |
As Edmonson and his team work to restore the Dunes, he acknowledges there is much to learn from Indigenous peoples, the original stewards of the land.
Indigenous knowledge and stewardship is being recognized with the creation of the Indiana Dunes Indigenous Cultural Trail, which aims to feature and honor the Miami and Potawatomi Indigenous peoples.
The trail includes a firepit adorned with Miami designs, and limestone turtles designed by a Potawatomi artist, among other trail elements. The trail is a collaboration between Indiana Dunes Tourism, Indiana Dunes National Park, and the Miami and Potawatomi tribes.
Bmejwen Kyle Malott, advanced language specialist with the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, hopes that visitors will broaden their understanding of the Potawatomi culture as they visit the trail. “We are the original people of this land here, and we are still living here where we originated,” he says.
The trail is meant not just to reflect the past, but the present and future of Potawatomi and Miami culture. “It’s in order to pay respect to all of our ancestors and the ones that are to come,” he says. “Because some of our responsibilities is to take care of what’s here, so we take care of it in order that our children and our grandchildren can have these things too,” he added.
Malott is hopeful other national parks can follow what’s been accomplished at Indiana Dunes. “I think any park or national park should work in collaboration with the local tribes of that land.”
Along with various interactive design elements, there are also efforts to plant and protect native plants, such as manoomin, a variety of wild rice.
“We work with one of the plants that is very directly tied to the Potawatomi peoples and Indigenous cultures, manoomin,” explains Jennifer Kanine, director of the Department of Natural Resources for the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi.
She and staff at the park harvest small amounts of the wild rice to reseed and strengthen existing beds, and treat invasive species that are directly adjacent to manoomin.
Park budget cuts, community action
Under the current administration, national parks have experienced significant budget cuts and staffing shortages. In fact, the Trump administration’s latest budget proposal aims to make a $736 million reduction to park operations, which will likely affect staffing.
Labovitz says that the loss of temporary workers and seasonal employees has added an immense strain on full-time employees. “They’re beat to death,” he says. “Every day is brutal,” adding that the park is doing much less public programming due to the lack of resources.
Meanwhile, residents of the community surrounding the park, who have long faced the negative health effects of pollution from nearby steel mills, are taking action to protect their environment.
Just Transition Northwest Indiana, a grassroots environmental justice organization, advocates moving away from coal-based steelmaking to greener alternatives.
“Most of the people I know have asthma; we all have inhalers,” says Lisa Vallee, organizing director, while adding, “We have the workforce, the facilities, the lake; we have everything we need to make green steel."
Julie Zenderoudi is a Canadian journalist based in Brooklyn, New York. She’s currently completing her master's degree at New York University in the science, health and environmental reporting program. She writes about the environmental impacts of fast fashion, and the intersection of climate and health.
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| Buffalo have reshaped the physical landscape of Nachusa Grasslands through their foraging and social behaviors. Photo: Madeline Shaw. |
Fire, Seeds and Grazing Hold the Key to Prairie Restoration at Nachusa Grasslands
Over 40 years, reintroduced native plants and buffalo have helped turn old agricultural land into a biodiverse ecosystem
By Madeline Shaw
One hundred miles west of Chicago, the rolling hills of Nachusa Grasslands offer a rare glimpse into one of the world’s most endangered ecosystems: the tallgrass prairie. Despite once blanketing the state, only one-tenth of 1% of Illinois’ prairie remains, the rest lost to agriculture and development.
Even the land that is now Nachusa was once home to rows of cornstalks and herds of cows, back when The Nature Conservancy purchased the first tract 40 years ago.
But prairie remnants lingered in the rocky hilltops and wetlands that farmers had avoided, holding the literal and figurative seeds that would eventually help restore more than 4,100 acres of this diverse ecosystem.
Restoration work often involves reintroducing natural forces that disappeared from the landscape. “Prairies evolved through disturbance — fire, flooding, grazing — and it really was never a stagnant ecosystem,” said Tyler Pellegrini, a restoration ecologist at Nachusa Grasslands. “Things were always changing.”
Rediscovering the benefits of burning
Fire is especially important to rewilding Nachusa.
A team of restoration ecologists and volunteers conducts controlled burns every year in the spring and fall on a rotating schedule, with sections burned every one to three years.
The fires slow the spread of invasive species, recycle nutrients back into the soil and allow more sunlight to reach sprouting native plants.
“The prairies just love that fire,” said Bill Kleiman, project director for the Nachusa Grasslands.
Indigenous Americans had long used fire as a land management practice, but conservationists only recognized its ecological benefits for species health and diversity more recently.
“We were missing the element of prescribed fire, which is what the Native people were doing all along,” said Kleiman, who is the statewide fire manager and has conducted more than 500 burns over his career.
Rockstars of the prairies
On a spring day in April, last fall’s fires were already yielding new growth. Green shoots standing just a few inches tall peeked out among the charred stems. The emerging native plants offer a tasty snack for grazing buffalo — also known as bison — the other key force shaping the prairie ecosystem.
First introduced to Nachusa in 2014, the buffalo herd is now 100 strong (and due to increase with the imminent arrival of this year’s calves).
Over more than a decade, they have left a noticeable mark on the prairie. They create large, shallow dirt pits in the grass — known as wallows — that provide insect habitats and collect rainwater.
Their fur also acts as insulation for birds’ nests, and their waste recycles nutrients that support future plant growth. Even their movements shape the landscape, aerating the soil and creating patches in grazed vegetation.
“Bison have been shown to be that ecological keystone, supporting habitat for many species,” said Cody Considine, deputy director for Nachusa.
But while they might be “the rockstars of the prairies,” he noted, “they are part of the whole” and no more important than the birds and grasses and other mammals that call the preserve home.
The herd is actively managed by Nachusa’s staff and is monitored by a veterinarian. When it becomes too large for the preserve to maintain, Nachusa sends its excess buffalo to Native American tribes looking to build their herds through the InterTribal Buffalo Council.
Prairie lab, seedbank, work of art
With so much restoration and conservation work underway, Nachusa essentially functions as a prairie laboratory.
At least 100 peer-reviewed papers have been published about the preserve, and it is home to a full-time ecosystem restoration scientist, Elizabeth Bach, who is studying the impact of restoration work on the plants, animals and soil of Nachusa.
The preserve is now home to 245 bird species, more than 700 native plants and unique animals like the ornate box turtle.
Overall, rewilding the prairie is hard, unrelenting work.
In addition to managing fires and buffalo herds, the staff and volunteers pick thousands of pounds of seeds every year from May through the end of October. Some smell like sweet hay, others like sweaty socks, but all of them are dried, processed, mixed and stored in paper barrels in the seed barn.
Some of the seeds will be sent to other prairie restoration projects, but with 50 to 60 pounds of seed needed per acre, most will be spread at Nachusa on individual plots adopted by volunteers.
The dedication of Nachusa’s volunteers is “like a beautiful work of art that people are doing collectively,” said SEJ board member and author Madeline Ostrander. “It’s this representation of the relationship we could be having with nature that we very seldom get to have.”
“It was like a love letter to the prairie,” Michelle Kanaar, visual editor at CatchLight, said of her visit to Nachusa. “It’s hopeful.”
Madeline Shaw is a freelance journalist and master’s student in NYU’s science, health and environmental reporting program. She covers biodiversity and conservation issues.
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| Tour participant John Mone inspects a piece of equipment at Chicago’s Metropolitan Water Reclamation District. Photo: Emma Schneck. |
After Record-Breaking Rains, Chicago’s Wastewater Managers Struggle To Serve Local Residents
Increasingly intense storms stress aging water-management infrastructure and fill new reservoirs to overflowing
By Emma Schneck
On April 15, Princess Shaw received over 15 calls in the middle of the night from folks who reported that their basements were flooded due to the recent storm.
Such calls are a regular occurrence for Shaw, whose work as a community advocate and founder of Light Up Lawndale has connected her to many individuals experiencing flooding across the South Side of Chicago.
While last week’s record-breaking rainfall caused flooding all over the city, these incidents have become increasingly frequent over the past decade, said Shaw. The flooding events occur when excess stormwater overwhelms the city’s infrastructure and forces water into the streets and riverways.
As a part of the #SEJ2026 conference, a group of journalists toured several sites around Chicago to understand the reality of the city’s wastewater situation.
Billions of gallons
The tour included various locations managed by the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, the government agency that oversees wastewater treatment and stormwater management for Cook County, Illinois.
Notably, the MWRD manages the wastewater reclamation point in Stickney, Illinois, which is one of the largest wastewater plants in the world.
According to Mike Hill, chief operating engineer of MWRD, the agency created the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan in the 1970s as a way to manage Chicago’s flooding problem. As municipal sewers were often overwhelmed with stormwater, the MWRD dug a series of tunnels, intercepting sewers and backup reservoirs to hold excess water.
“After large storm events, we store stormwater in these large reservoirs until we are able to treat it,” said Hill.
If the reservoirs reach capacity, any additional wastewater is diluted and then diverted into Chicago’s waterways.
Despite being one of the largest wastewater treatment facilities in the world, the system will overfill if the city receives too much rainfall within any given time.
The largest TARP containment unit, the McCook Reservoir, can hold up to 3.5 billion gallons of wastewater at a time.
But when the tour participants visited this reservoir, it was already at full capacity, with additional rainfall predicted for the coming week.
Since the McCook Reservoir went online in 2017, the system has overfilled nine times, said MWRD engineer Anthony Zogas.
And as Chicago experiences more record-breaking rainfalls, Zogas attests that these overfill instances are happening with increasing frequency.
Rain barrels or bigger pipes?
When asked about MWRD’s long-term plans to adapt to increasing rainwater entering the city’s infrastructure, Zogas pointed to one potential solution: rain barrels.
He said that having individual residents collect their own stormwater in barrels can help keep it out of the system and prevent overflow. The MWRD website encourages residents to use this water for a variety of household uses, such as watering plants.
However, to Light Up Lawndale’s Shaw and other community activists, this kind of initiative does not address the root cause of Chicago’s flooding problem: aging infrastructure that has not been adapted for Chicago’s modern needs.
As Shaw sees it, Chicago’s flooding problem “is a structural issue, not an individual one. We have to make these systems work for us today.”
Cyatharine Alias, a director at the Center for Neighborhood Technology, shares a similar outlook on Chicago’s wastewater infrastructure. “We need bigger pipes, and we need better water storage,” she explained.
Beyond fixing Chicago’s wastewater physical infrastructure, Shaw would like to see city and government officials working directly with communities affected by flooding. “We need better collaboration across agencies and with communities,” she said. “The city of Chicago needs to acknowledge the harm that has happened.”
These discussions resonated with tour participant John Mone, a press officer with the Danish-based organization Grundfos. In his opinion, the tour highlighted a need for better collaboration between city officials and community organizers.
“A lot of what we witnessed today is the direct consequence of aging infrastructure and water-stressed systems that have worsened due to climate change,” Mone said. “Last I checked, clean drinking water is a pretty bipartisan issue.”
Emma Schneck is a New York-based environmental journalist originally from Hawai’i. She holds a master’s degree in nature, society and environmental governance from the University of Oxford. She currently runs a newsletter on the environmental impacts of tourism and travel.
* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 11, No. 16. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.
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